“That’s not philosophy, Dad. That’s ethics.”
“Okay, but would it be wrong? Would it be a sin?”
Julianna looked as if the word embarrassed her. “I don’t know about sin. You’d have to know you were doing something against your moral code for it to be wrong. I mean, an Aztec who sacrificed a child to please his god would think he was doing right because it would be in accordance with his moral code, but the Catholic conquistador would know it was wrong because it was against his.”
“So there’s no such things as absolute wrong? It just depends on when and where you live?”
“Well, and on whether or not you’re schizophrenic, I should think,” said Daniel.
It was to everyone’s surprise that Minty spoke. “Murder’s wrong,” she said loudly. “It’s always wrong. It’s taking away someone’s life. You can’t get round that.”
“If there was ever a gloomy subject for a birthday party,” said Sonovia, “this crowns it all. Open another bottle of wine, for goodness’ sake, Laf.” She was at the window, where she’d moved when everyone converged on Laf and his problem in ethics. “Minty,” she exclaimed. “Look at this. There’s an ambulance next door. It must be for Mr. Kroot.”
Though midsummer, it was quite dark by now and raining, but they all crowded to the window to see the paramedics come out, not with a stretcher, but a wheelchair in which the old man sat, a blanket over his knees and another over his head.
“Heart attack or stroke,” said Sonovia. “Take your pick. It could be either.”
Julianna was coming round with freshly filled wineglasses when the doorbell rang. The paramedic on the doorstep handed Sonovia a key and said, “He says, will you feed his cat? There’s tins in the cupboard.”
“What’s he got wrong with him?”
“I couldn’t say. There’ll have to be tests.”
Kieran Goodall’s mother, Lianne, finally came home at midnight. Though not verbally reproached for her absence from the house, she obviously believed that the best form of defense was attack. First she told the police officers that she wasn’t Kieran’s mother but his stepmother, so couldn’t be held responsible for his behavior. His mother had disappeared years ago and having married Lianne, his father also had gone. He and she, without claim on one another, had lived here for the past five years. Maybe she was his guardian, no one had made her so, it had just happened. Having asked, “What’s he done?” she hadn’t waited for an answer but had launched into a tirade against the Social Services who, she said, had been only too pleased to “dump” him on her and hadn’t even tried to find his natural parents. Told about the money missing from Eileen Dring’s holdall and the money found on Kieran and Dillon, she said that crazy old people ought to be stopped from carrying large sums about with them. It was a temptation to young kids. Kieran was asked about the knife. He’d put it in a litter bin, he said, and began shrieking with laughter.
“If you’ve had one of my knives, Kieran,” said his stepmother, “I’ll knock the living daylights out of you.”
Half a mile away in Kensal Road, Dillon Bennett had withdrawn his remark about putting the knife down a drain. He’d never seen a knife. By now, sitting in one of the battered leather armchairs squeezed up against his sister who had one arm round him, he told his questioners Eileen Dring had been dead when he and Kieran came upon her.
“How did you know she was dead, Dillon?”
“She was all over blood. Buckets of it. She had to be dead.”
His head drooped and he fell asleep.
Chapter 30
IT SEEMED TO Michelle in vain that she told Violent Crimes she and Matthew scarcely knew where the site of the murder was. This part of London was unknown territory. Like all Londoners, they had heard of the cemetery, but that was all.
“ ‘Before we go to paradise,’ ” quoted Matthew, “ ‘by way of Kensal Green.’ ”
They gave him uneasy smiles but Michelle thought they didn’t believe her. An alibi? They no more had one for this killing than for the one in the cinema. As always, they could only alibi each other and what was the use of that? They’d been in bed, asleep.
When they’d arrived this time, Matthew had just come back from the studios where he’d been making the first in the next series of his program and she’d been in the kitchen chopping mint for sauce. Matthew had progressed with such leaps and bounds that though he wouldn’t, of course, eat lamb, which mint sauce naturally accompanied, he was growing quite fond of having it on potatoes and last week had even eaten a miniature Yorkshire pudding. Violent Crimes fixed his eyes on the knife in her hand, a big thing like a butcher’s cleaver that could only be used to kill someone if you chopped their head off. But she had put it down and covered it and the mint with a sheet of kitchen roll as if she were guilty of the crime they seemed to suspect her of committing.
As usual these days she’d only been able to pick at the meal she’d prepared. But Matthew, by his standards, had eaten heartily of the potatoes and mint sauce, several slices of chicken, with caramel custard to follow. Six months ago he’d have thrown up at the sight of caramel custard. He talked about the program, that this first one concentrated on how taking on a new interest in life, earning money, and meeting new people could have a beneficent effect on the anorexic and citing himself as an example. Michelle always saw him with the eyes she’d seen the thin young man she’d fallen in love with, but even she, once she’d struggled to look at him as a stranger might, could make herself aware that he was very different in appearance from what he’d been the year before. This question of the images a woman might create of others and of herself interested her. She knew now that she’d always seen herself as fat, as a child, as a teenager, all through the years when she was normal-sized, and she did so now after all the weight she had lost. Did Matthew always see himself as emaciated?
She went upstairs and mounted the scales. They registered a weight loss so dramatic that it would have been frightening in anyone who didn’t know the reason for it. Stepping off, she looked at herself in the mirror and tried to apply that “stranger’s eyes” test. Up to a point she succeeded and for a moment or two the woman of twenty years ago looked back at her, a woman with just one chin, with a waist and a stomach which, though hardly flat, no longer made her appear in the seventh month of pregnancy. Once she’d turned away the fat lady was back. But what did it matter? What did any of it matter compared with their situation as suspects in two murder cases?
Matthew was washing the dishes. Or, rather, he had reached the stage of drying them. The mirrored woman, though not truly believed in when her reflection was gone, had just the same given Michelle the kind of self-esteem she hadn’t known for a long time. She trembled when she realized what it was: sexual confidence. She put her arms round Matthew from behind and laid her cheek against his back. He turned round, smiling. It was years since she’d seen that particular look on his face. He put his arms round her and kissed her the way he’d kissed her the second time they’d met, and with a tremor of joy and pain she understood that after the years of terror he was courting her all over again.
Jims had arranged everything, from his solicitor’s letter requesting Zillah to quit Abbey Gardens Mansions by the end of the week to the moving van that arrived at eight sharp on Friday morning. Another letter, this time from Jims himself and couched in the coolest terms, informed her she could keep her car. He would pay for Jordan’s operation to be carried out privately in a Shaston nursing home. Sir Ronald Grasmere, for old friendship’s sake, would permit her to move into Willow Cottage before completion of the purchase. He had already signed the contract.